Early disaster-response issues still exist

Thursday

Jul 26, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Goshen — Disaster response is fast becoming a mid-Hudson specialty. Four floods in four years, including one last month, have turned Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties into hotbeds of rescue and recovery.

Greg Bruno

Goshen — Disaster response is fast becoming a mid-Hudson specialty. Four floods in four years, including one last month, have turned Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties into hotbeds of rescue and recovery.

But despite the practice, some aspects of emergency planning remain a work in progress.

According to documents obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law, "lessons learned" by Orange County bureaucrats in Goshen after floods in April 2005 included the need for better radio equipment and more staff at the county's operation center.

And yet the problems remained 14 months later. An "after action report" assessing the June 2006 floods found similar issues, detailed identically — word for word.

"Fire radio frequencies were too congested to effectively communicate between the 911 Center and the fire companies in the field," the mirror-image reports in 2005 and 2006 read. "There was no formal communications system between the local and county" emergency operation centers.

Orange County emergency officials say they have made progress. Of the 12 "lessons learned" following the 2005 deluge, six were remedied by the June 2006 storm, according to the documents. Those that remain, like overly congested fire frequencies and a sluggish communication system, are slowly being addressed. The county hopes to roll out a mobile communication center in the near future to help eliminate some of the radio issues.

But Walt Koury, Orange County's commissioner of emergency services, said some challenges will continue. "When you get a major emergency such as this, everyone is trying to talk to each other and it gets very difficult," Koury said. "The big picture still exists."